I'll say it is probably dying if not at lease the filesystem on it is dirty. take the SD card to another PC have the filesystem repaired first. And while you have the SD card on the PC, make backup of it after filesystem repair.

Usually when fsck failed with not enough memory that mean swap is not set. fsck require large amount of memory because it does all the correction in memory before it write back to storage. simply setup a swap space usually will address fsck not enough memory problem.

I had an SD card fail after ~15 months of use. The symptoms I saw were that writes "succeeded" (in that no error was reported), but nothing was actually written. Somewhat disconcerting - it tests your sanity.To fix it I switched to using a USB drive instead - only /boot is now on SD for me.

tried to fix/check my SD card this morning, but when putting it back into the SheevaPlug it didn't come up again. My first guess was that I screwed the FSs, but at a second glance it was "just", that the PSU failed (just flashing LEDs).

So I put it into my second spare Plug, which boots, but it came up without any ethernet interface (ifconfig just report a lo; guess I have to check the uboot settings).

Luckily I still had a spare GuruPlug PSU from a friend lying around, so I soldered it into the broken SheevaPlug, which then came up nicely.

So I still have to monitor if that SD issue was triggered by a "weak" PSU, or if the issue persists ...

Why would you need so much memory to fsck a file system? What on Earth would you do if you ever needed to fsck a 1TB disk?It only checks the meta-data, and it doesn't even need to keep all of that in memory at once anyway.The "memory allocation failure" sounds like a bug. It's found a problem on the disk, but is treating the data as real, so trying to allocate vast amounts of memory.,